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The Tide Has Finally Turned – Networks Eat Hierarchy for Breakfast
Apologies to Peter Drucker for hijacking his famous culture versus strategy statement, but for us, the recent 2017 Deloitte Global Trends tome signals a tipping of the scales that we have been anticipating, frankly, for decades. The Deloitte survey of some 10,000+ business and HR leaders across 140 countries voted “Organization of the Future: Arriving Now” as the number 1 human capital trend that concerns them most.
Are we Getting Closer to True Knowledge Sharing Systems?
First generation knowledge management (KM) systems were essentially re-labelled content stores. Labelling such content as ‘knowledge’ did much to discredit the whole Knowledge Management movement of the 1990s. During this time, I commonly referred to knowledge management systems as needing to comprise both “collections and connections”, but we had forgotten about the “connections”.
Knowing-Doing Gap
In this post we continue to explore how we might better engage the “Long Tail” participants in our Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) communities. In 2000 Jeffey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton published their book entitled the “Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action” . Its publication was timely for many of us working in Knowledge Management programs at the time as it reinforced to us that knowledge sharing alone is not enough. What they found in their research was that there were many under-performing companies who really didn’t have a knowledge problem. Their problem was more with actioning what they knew. For example, they talk about organisations who have a culture of fear, where staff were reluctant to take actions unless they were 100% sure of a positive outcome. A summary of their recommendations can be found in this FastCompany interview. In essence the authors recommend prioritising “action over words”. At times this may mean taking actions that could be considered ill-prepared for. However, they use the examples of Bill Gross’ Idea Lab and Thomas Edison’s Labs of learning environments, where ‘safe’ actions can be taken in the spirit of experimentation and learning, thereby generating tangible value for the organisation. In other words, “stop thinking about it and just try something!”.
AirBnB vs Booking.com….your preference?
Having spent the last week immersed in ‘Platfirms’ (platform businesses) I now have some time to reflect as we leisurely wind our way through the French Pyrenees. In preparing for this trip I drew on my favourite accommodation platforms Airbnb and Booking.com. I’ll be up front and say I do have a preference for Airbnb. However, Booking.com tends to come into its own when looking for more affordable accommodation in the larger cities or towns. Putting this aside however, and reflecting on one of the key messages I have been making around relationship-centred measures over simple activity measures, I can see a subtle but clear difference between the two platforms when it comes to relationships. Both sites are B2C businesses looking to facilitate strong relationships between their suppliers (properties) and customers (consumers) through the social media they enable. I recently published this diagram to identify potential relationship connections being facilitated by platform businesses.
The Age of the ‘Platfirm’
Platfirm? Is this a made up word? Well actually, yes. It’s the term Open Knowledge has coined to describe businesses whose core business model is the platform. The ‘Platfirm Age’ is the theme of this year’s social business forum (#SBF16) held in Milan, Italy each year. Essentially a ‘platfirm’ is a firm that facilitates exchanges within a business ecosystem of suppliers and consumers. The popular examples of ebay, Airbnb, Uber and Amazon are regularly talked about in platform conversations. In opening the forum, Open Knowledge Co-founder Rosario Sica provided some compelling statistics to demonstrate that we are indeed in a new age of platform enabled business models. In Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook we now have 4 of the top 5 companies in the world, by market capitalisation, being ‘Platfirms’. The issue of ‘Platfirm immigrants’ (as opposed to ‘platfirm natives’) was highlighted as a continuing challenge for traditional businesses wanting to get on the ‘from foot’, in either protecting or enhancing their businesses though platform thinking.
Book Review: “Networked: The New Social Operating System” – Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman
Having spent considerable time researching in field of Social Network Analysis (SNA), Barry Wellman was well known to me. We have never met face-to-face but I had met up with a number of his Netlab colleagues at a couple of INSA Sunbelt conferences. My first recollection of Wellman’s work goes back to some of his early pre-Internet research on electronically facilitated communications and the social network.
Roundabouts and Network Leadership
Mythbusters two hosts, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, test the effectiveness of a traditional 4-way stop versus a roundabout. Having grown up with roundabouts I wasn’t particularly surprised to discover that roundabouts got almost 20% more cars through compared to the 4-way stop.